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A Bold Step Toward Vision Zero

During the public hearings on the Comprehensive Plan, and in the Transportation Expert Group (advising PBOT on the Transportation System Plan) PBOT took some heat on a lackluster safety policy (someone characterized it as “keep doing what we’ve been doing”).

I’m happy to report that PBOT has stepped up. At Tuesday’s Planning and Sustainability Commission meeting they proposed the following policy language to guide the City’s efforts for the next 20 years:

Transportation safety impacts the livability of a city and the comfort and security of those using City streets. Comprehensive efforts to improve transportation safety through engineering, education, enforcement and evaluation will be used to eliminate traffic related fatalities and serious injuries from Portland’s transportation system.

About Chris Smith

Chris Smith, a citizen activist focused on transportation, neighborhoods and civic engagement, is the founder of PortlandTransport.com. He currently serves on the Portland Planning and Sustainability Commission and the board of Portland Streetcar Inc. His day job is as Site Architect for Xerox.com.

6 Responses to A Bold Step Toward Vision Zero

This is excellent. Now, let’s see this put into use by beefing up multimodal transportation. That means more of our transportation budget should go toward protected bike lanes, traffic calming/road diets, and pedestrian amenities. Additionally, this should go hand-in-hand with creating more dense corridors along many of our roadways that have become speed corridors for commuters. We must continue to make “place” all over the city. This means east of 205 as well. 102, 122 and upward could become excellent N-S routes if they beef up fixed transit and bike/ped amenities. Same could go for all of Sandy Blvd and Burnside. They scream for a road diet and bike infrastructure!

I think NYC has surpassed Portland in many ways. You guys have some excellent protected bikeways now. I’m really hoping the people in charge here realize we need to allocate more funds to making all of our city welcoming and safe to pedestrians and bikers.

What you say is true, but Portland doesn’t have dangerous roads that’s anything close to Queens Boulevard, Hempstead Turnpike or Flatbush Avenue. The only saving grace with Queens Boulevard is you can pass under it by entering & exiting the subway stations along it.

In NYC, you can drive onto the sidewalk at 50 mph, run over muitiple people, claim it was an “accident” and get let off the hook with “no criminality suspected” from the NYPD — keeping your license to drive!

I hope you’re doing better than NYC in Portland. There’s a serious enforcement problem in NYC.